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For Ying Liang

May 7, 2012

Having just come back from a few invigorating, even exhilarating days of discussion and moviegoing at the Maryland Film Festival—which is one of the country’s leading showcases for the work of American independents—I’ve got independent filmmaking on my mind. I’ve always felt that independence is mainly a state of mind—that there’s no difference in kind between a major studio project and a movie made on video for virtually nothing. Both depend on invention and imagination; just as the studio director doesn’t deserve extra credit for the vast toolbox employed, the independent director doesn’t deserve it for the obstacles overcome in making the film. The platforms of release may be different and the bray of promotion may be vastly unequal, but no amount of money can buy good images and no admirable account of perseverance can overcome the lack of them.

Yet, in places where filmmaking is controlled by the government, independence is something else altogether. This fact was brought back to mind with force and anguish over the weekend, when the Malaysian filmmaker Edmund Yeo (who lives in Japan) posted at his blog about a terrifying situation faced by the independent Chinese director Ying Liang, who is one of the best young filmmakers in the world (he’s thirty-five years old; three of his features have been shown here, none in commercial release).

Specifically, Ying has a seemingly instinctive eye for incisive angles—there’s something amazingly relaxed and spontaneous about his cannily expressive compositions—as well as a naturally analytical grasp of revealing situations and moments. His stories are straightforward and simple, but they make contact with the most sensitive points of Chinese life, which he views with a quiet, stoic, almost ironic outrage—until his narratives burst forth with grand-scale catastrophes (filmed documentary-style, on scant budgets). His apocalyptic imagination has an inescapably sociopolitical and gloriously metaphorical dimension. I’ve written in the magazine about his first three features (“Taking Father Home,” “The Other Half,” and “Good Cats”), as well as his short film “Condolences” and, for that matter, about Ying himself, whom I met when he came to town in 2009.

The film that got Ying in trouble is his latest, “When Night Falls,” which, according to Yeo, was shown in the Jeonju film festival, in South Korea. Yeo’s post has a wide range of details about the film and the case. The movie is based on the true story of a man who was “executed in 2008 for murdering six policemen with a knife in a Shanghai police station after being arrested and beaten for riding an unlicensed bicycle.”

Yeo quotes from Ying’s post on Facebook, which states that, after the film was shown in Jeonju, his family, in Shanghai, and his wife’s family, in Sichuan, were visited and intimidated by the Chinese police, who then tried “to buy the copyright of the film” in Korea for an extraordinarily high price. Ying adds that he returned to Hong Kong (where he is currently working) and learned that he would be arrested if he goes back to China.

Ying followed up with another post, which Yeo quotes; it’s deeply moving and should be read in its entirety; it’s a letter to his parents, in which he asks them to keep a record of threats by the police and discusses the over-all conditions of life in China, of what he calls “this country’s corrupt system”:

A single line you say or a single film is enough threaten your own safety. Freedom is used merely as a bargaining chip. This system existed because we ourselves contributed and encouraged it.

Ying’s political ideas are admirable, his intentions are honorable—and he’s a true and rare artist. He has both the skill and the audacity to make ingenious and moving films that convey his critical view of the intimate and public devastation wrought by abuses of state power. And his point about the shared responsibility for these abuses came out this weekend, in a post on the Times site by Edward Wong, regarding an altogether different zone of film-related activity in China.

On the occasion of the release in China of “Titanic 3-D,” James Cameron visited Beijing and, Wong writes, met “with people in the Chinese film industry to talk about doing joint productions and getting greater distribution for his 3-D films.” Wong interviewed Cameron there, and the discussion turned to the subject of censorship (the nude scenes were cut from the film there). Cameron said that he thinks that censorship is “less restrictive” in China now than when the original “Titanic” was released there, fifteen years ago (“we’re moving in the right direction”). He likened censorship in China to the American ratings system (“it’s really just a form of censorship indirectly”) yet allowed that, with the U.S. system, “You’ve got a little more choice in it. It’s not as draconian. But I can’t be judgmental about another culture’s process. I don’t think that’s healthy.”

Wong took the matter further, asking, “Did you talk to other filmmakers—your peers—about Chinese censorship?” Cameron’s response was, for me, a shock:

No. I’m not interested in their reality. My reality is that I’ve made two films in the last 15 years that both have been resounding successes here, and this is an important market for me. And so I’m going to do what’s necessary to continue having this be an important market for my films. And I’m going to play by the rules that are internal to this market. Because you have to. You know, I can stomp my feet and hold my breath but I’m not going to change people’s minds that way. Now I do feel that everything is trending in the right direction right now, as I mentioned earlier.

I do believe that the liberalizing element of American pop movies may be most clearly visible in an illiberal society, and that the distribution in China of “Titanic,” even without its nude scene, is not a bad thing—though I wonder whether “Hugo,” the subject of which is a boy who eludes the police and restores to prominence an artist relegated to oblivion, will get an official release in China, and, in any case, whether the impact of such a movie would be diminished by remaining available only as DVD samizdat. But disks that circulate hand to hand or are bought covertly on the street don’t cut Cameron a percentage. While Ying, Ai Weiwei, Chen Guangcheng, Liu Xiaobo, and many other artists and writers in China are undergoing brazen persecution at the hands of the government, Cameron dismisses their “reality” while propagandizing for the Chinese government in order to promote his business interests. And if Cameron’s billion-dollar platform isn’t enough of a bully pulpit, what is? (Of course, the April 22nd interview with Cameron preceded Ying’s problems and Chen’s escape; but the intensified repression of intellectuals in China has been reported for quite a while, as notably by Evan Osnos, in the magazine and on this site.)

Note the use and abuse of “copyright” in the attempted censorship of “When Night Falls.” The notion of the Chinese police attempting to buy and prevent release of the movie (imagine a film festival outside China getting hold of a copy—the Chinese government would denounce the practice as piracy, perhaps even sue) is simply grotesque. Who would have recognized, for example, any copyright by the Soviet Union on works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Andrei Sakharov or Joseph Brodsky, an assertion of rights by the Czechoslovak puppet government to works by Václav Havel, or claims by the Iranian government to Jafar Panahi’s “This Is Not a Film”? The chutzpah is astounding.

P.S. “Taking Father Home” and “The Other Half” are available here on DVD; “The Other Half” can be streamed on Netflix and Amazon.